WEST PALM BEACH —
Seven months after the opening of the biggest redevelopment project in Palm Beach County since the Great Recession, a wave of big-box stores is setting up shop over the next two months on the outskirts of the Palm Beach Outlets. Nearly a dozen new stores, including T.J. Maxx, Ulta Beauty and DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse, are scheduled to open by early-November just west of the open-air outlet mall on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. The 300,000-square-foot Marketplace at the Outlets, will ultimately house roughly 20 stores, most of which will be national chains.

“Those large box retailers all want to be together in one place, and that will create more synergy for the center,” said Rebel Cook, a commercial real estate broker based in Jupiter and president of the Economic Forum of Palm Beach County. As the stores relocate, Cook said the vacant space with be redeveloped or taken over by other retailers. Retail space along Okeechobee Boulevard is desirable because of the amount of traffic along the road every day and its proximity to other shopping areas, experts say.

“Palm Beach Lakes, it used to be the center of West Palm Beach,” Cook said. “If you traveled up 95, you got off at the old mall. Then the area died. Now, you have a resurgence of activity.”

JUPITER —
New restaurants. A luxury movie theater. A gated community with 275 residences, retail and biotech. A bigger gas station. A new medical office building. A $150 million entertainment center. More retail All these are being built and proposed on Indiantown Road, the town’s main east-west roadway. The road starts at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre on State Road A1A and goes west about a dozen miles past Florida’s Turnpike to the Beeline Highway. In between are local places like Average Joe’s Pub to auto dealerships to giant retailers such as Wal-Mart.

But Rebel Cook, a north county commercial property Realtor who is the agent for a 2-acre vacant parcel on Indiantown Road near Town Hall, said Indiantown Road is a future economic engine for Jupiter. “If I had five properties on Indiantown Road, I could sell them right now,” Cook said. The fact that there is little undeveloped land on the town’s main road to and from the beach makes the property valuable, Cook said. As that inventory shrinks, the properties with older buildings will be redeveloped, said Cook, whose office is off Indiantown Road near Wal-Mart. “The traffic is not that bad. The complainers are old-timers who don’t want growth or development. But they have to understand that development brings revenue to businesses and tax dollars to local government,” Cook said.